Born in Rocken, Germany, Nietzsche
studied classical philology at the Universities of Bonn and
Leipzig (1864-5). He became professor of classical philology at
the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1869 at the age of 24,
but resigned from the post ten years later owing to ill health,
having been granted a pension. Nietzsche's creative life spanned
from the publication of The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 to
the production of Twilight of the Idols and The
Antichrist (a vehemently polemical attack on Christian
belief) in late 1888. In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental
collapse from which he never recovered. He was cared for by his
mother, and subsequently by his sister, until his death in 1900.
The apparent ease with which it is possible to read Nietzsche's
books is deceptive. Stylistically, he is one of the most
approachable of philosophers, but the complexity of his ideas and
their development defies simple exegesis. What follows merely
selects some of the more influential aspects of his thought and
places them in the context of their effect upon recent philosophy
and critical theory.

Nietzsche's writings have had a
significant impact on philosophy, literature, critical theory,
and even theology. Figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Martin
Heidegger (who views Nietzsche primarily in the context of his own
critique of western metaphysical thought), Jean-Paul Sartre, D.H.
Laurence, Thomas .Mann, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida,
and Jean-Francois Lyotard have all been subject in one way or
another to his influence. In the twentieth century Nietzsche's
name has had a chequered history: it has been associated by
various critics of the times with the German militarism of the
1914-18 war and the Nazism of the 1939-45 waran association
primarily caused in the latter case by the unscrupulous
exegetical attitudes of Nazi "intellectuals," and by
his sister's own Nazi sympathies. In the English-speaking world
Nietzsche's postwar rehabilitation was in large part due to
Walter Kaufmann's classic study, Nietzsche: Philosopher,
Psychologist, Antichrist (1950; fourth revised edition 1974)
which challenged many widely held misconceptions about his
philosophy.

Nietzsche was initially
influenced by the thought of Schopenhauer, and also by his
association uith the composer Richard Wagner, and his early
writings (principally The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and
two of the four Untimely Meditations, "Schopenhauer
as Educator" and "Richard Wagner in Bavreuth,"
published in 1874 and 1876 respectively) pay homage to these
figures. The Birth of Tragedy is a remarkable text which
attempts to reinterpret the significance of Greek tragedy by
understanding it as a sublimated expression of the inherent
violence of ancient Greek culture. Nietzsche's analysis
introduces the aesthetic categories "Apollinian" and
"Dionysian" as a means of decoding the meaning of Greek
tragedy. The Apollinian represents the formal constraints and
structures necessary for artistic expression: "the
form-giving force, which reached its consummation in Greek
culture" (Kaufmann, 1974 p 128). The Dionysian, on the other
hand, embodies violent and chaotic forces of becoming. These
forces, Nietzsche argues, were harnessed and sublimated by the
Apollinian element to make possible the production of the
classical Greek cultural legacy. Wagner's music is presented in The
Birth of Tragedy as a means for attaining a rejuvenated
contemporary German national culture akin to that achieved by the
Greeks. By the time he wrote Human, All Too Human
(1878), however, Nietzsche had turned away from Wagner, seeing
him not so much as a source of hope for the future of culture as
a symptom of contemporary decline. Likewise, Nietzsche came to
view Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy in a more critical
light, while his attitude toward nationalism steadily hardened (a
tendency already hinted at in the first Untimely Meditation,
devoted to attacking the "cultural philistinism"
exemplified by David Strauss's The Old and the New Faith).

Nietzsche's books spanning
1878-82 mark what some scholars have termed his
"positivistic" period (Habermas, 1981). Whether or not
such a term can adequately serve to define the approaches
Nietzsche experimented with in Human, All Too Human, Daybreak
(1881), and The Gay Science (published in 1882, with
Book V added in 1885), many of the themes and concerns which are
taken up in his later works receive their prelirninary airings in
these booksfor example, an increasing epistemological skepticism, a growing interest in psychology
and physiology, the development of a power theory, the famous
announcement of the "death of God," and the recasting
of ethical issues in terms of these ideas. Equally, Human,
All Too Human marks a turn to the aphoristic style of
expression which Nietzsche was to adopt in most of his later works.

The production of Thus
Spoke Zarathustra (parts I and II, 1883; part III, 1884; and
part IV 1885) marks the beginning of Nietzsche's most productive
period. An often rhapsodic text, Zarathustra takes the
form of a philosophically oriented biblical parody. Most
significantly, it announces the need for the "overman"
(‹bermensch) as the supreme goal of human activity. The overman
represents for Nietzsche the highest expression of human
potential, a creative being able to give meaning to a universe which
can no longer be adequatels explained in terms of the outmoded metaphysical postulates and religious beliefs of
Christian ontology.

In his mature thought Nietzsche
developed a holistic view of the cosmos in which all identities
are the product of relations of force (The Will to Power,
1968, section 1067). This notion forms the basis for his
contention that life itself can be comprehended in terms of an
interplay of power relations: "power" as such does not
exist, but "power-relationships between two or more
forces" do (ibid., 631). All living beings are an expression
of this network of contending forces. All life, Nietzsche holds,
seeks to enhance its own feeling of power, which is none other
than an expression of its "will to power." The pursuit
of power can have many forms of expression, ranging from the
tyrannical desire to control others to the ascetic's will to
self-denial and self-discipline, which enhances his or her
feeling of power by subjugating the demands of the body.

The emphasis on power in
Nietzsche's thinking forms the basis for his critique of
conventionally accepted moral codes, and forms the core of On
the Genealogy of Morals (1887;1968). Ethical systems,
according to Nietzsche, can be divided into two different camps
representing contending interests, "master morality"
and "slave morality." Master morality evaluates the
world from the perspective of attained domination and power. In
consequence, Nietzsche argues, master morality is primarilv
affirmative in character since it emanates from the standpoint of
a dominant social grouping which first affirms itself as
"good," and only after that conceptualizes those of a
lower rank as "bad." Slave morality, on the other hand,
is generated from the perspective of the oppressed. The slave
feels him or herself to be the helpless victim of a superior
force and, unable to take practical action to rectify the
situation, labels that force "evil." The slave's
conception of "good" is a secondary,
"reactive" (Deleuze, 1983) consequence of this negative
judgment. In Nietzsche's terms, Christian culture is a prime
example of slave morality, while ancient Roman culture
exemplifies master morality Modernity finds itself caught between
the two ethical forms: "today there is perhaps no more
decisive mark of a 'higher nature'. . . than that of being a
genuine battleground of these opposed values" (Nietzsche,
1968, part I, p. 16). Nietzsche's concern with modernity, that
is, with what he came to see as the nihilistic heritage of a
Christian tradition which had reached the point of
self-destruction, marks him out in the eyes of many critics as
the, progenitor of postmodernism. According to Gianni; Vattimo, for example,
"It could be legitimately argued that philosophical
post-modernity is bornt with Nietzsche's work" (Vattimo,
1988, p. 164). 2

During the postwar period
Nietzsche's thought exerted a marked influence upon philosophers
and theorists in a variety of ways. Within the Frankfurt school,
the neo-.\larxist tendencies which. epitomize the approaches of
Nlax HORKFIELMER,; Theodor .4DoR.~o, Herbert .\L`Ra SE, and
Walter~ BE.NJ.~ur.N are frequently tempered by elements' of
Nietzschean skepticism. For example, the force~ of Nietzsche's
critique of rationalist principles~ contnbutes a significant
element to Adorno and, Horkheimer's Dialeetic of Enlightenment
(1944),4 N\hich charts the development of the enlightenment
in terms of a struggle for power which, in its attempt to banish
prescientific mythologies, recoils = into creating a new
mythological structure of~ rationalist tenets to replace them.
Adorno's later~ development - especially in Minima Mora/ia

(1951), which uses the
aphoristic style favoured by ~ .\ietzsche, and 4gainsl
Ep~stemology (19;6)- fre-; quentlv- exhibits a Nietzschean turn
of thought,6 whereby the foundational principles of critical
reason are consistently revealed as having an all too human,
and hence questionable, basis. ~

Imong those thinkers within the
structuralist, and poststructuralist traditions, Nietzsche's
impact is most obviously evident in the work of Nfichel FOUCAU(T,
Gilles DELEt ZE~ Paul DE .\I.~N, Jacques DERRrDA, and
Jean-Fran,cois LYOTARD. Foucault s attempt at elucidating a
"genealogical" model of history self-consciouslv- draws
upon Nietzsche's analysis of power and his critique of the
"subject" in a way which seeks to overturn both liberal
and

F .\larxist presuppositions
about knowledge and politics. For Foucault, as for
Nietzsche, knowledge is not composed of an autonomous body of
abstract theorems that exist independently of prevailing~ social
forces. On the contran, the st~iving for knowledge is in
fact a striv-ing for mastery over reality; hence
"kno'A-ledge" is in fact a term which can be thought of
as being synonv-mous with "power."

For Gilles Delenze, Nietzsche
is a thinker worthy of close and careful interpretation (see
Deleuze's Vet-<ehe aml Philosophy, first published in 1962)
and the source of a number of key terrns in his own philosophical
v-ocabulan-. Deleuze sees Nietzsche as a "nomadic"
thinker who spurns the dualistic institutional and state
structures which dominate

modern life in favour of a
monistic and yet polymorphous philosophy of becoming.
Perhaps the most interesting example of Nieusche's influence -on
Deleuze is to be found in A Thot~sand Plateans (Deleuze and
Guatarri, 1980), which draws upon Nietzsche's psychological and
physiological accounts of power relations in its formulation of a
highlv problematic critique of authoritarian discourse, replete
with an essentialism consisting of "nomadic

essences." ~

Nietzsche also casts his
distinctive shadow over a the deconstructive work of both Paul de
Man and | Jacques Derrida. For de Man (1979), Nietzsche's 3 texts
are PAMDIGM cases of self-deconstructing ar- = guments which
destabilize their own structure. Derrida too sees Nietzsche as a
precursor of the deconstructive techniques which he himself has
used to criticize the "logocentric" tendencies of the
~'estern tradition. I lowever, N'ietzsche is also a much more
problematic figure for Derrida than he is for Deleuze. For
example, Derrida's analysis of the "left" and
"right" tendencies of Nietzschean DlscocrRsE in The Ear
of the Other (1982) demonstrates a critical concern with the
"destinational" structures of justification supplied by
Nietzsche's own writings, and theu subsequent appropriation by
seemingly opposed positions. Jean-Francois Lyotard's postmodern
discourse is marked by a -cross-fertilization of l\ ietzschean
and K^NTian influences in its advocacy of both an agonistic
view of human relations and the role of an aestheticaHy oriented
AV.~NT-GARDE (see The Postmodern Condition, 1979). Lyotard's
position, hov,-ever, has been modified by his reading of
philosophers from the analytic tradition (poncipally Kripke and
WITTGKNSTEIN). In The Differend (1983) he constructs a
formalistic philosophy of language in w-hich the term
postmodern is rendered a potentially problematic manifestation of
Nietzschean discourse: "a goal for a certain hurnanity . . .
(A bad parody of Nietzsche. ~h!-~)" (section 182).